Christoph Niemann - Abstract City

In 2008 I started drawing and writing Abstract City, a visual blog for the New York Times. The topics I chose ranged from the joy of riding the almost destroyed my design career.

Editor: Deborah Aaronson

Design: Office of Paul Sahre

Production Manager: Jules

Thomson

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication

Data:

Niemann, Christoph.

Abstract city / Christoph

Niemann.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4197-0207-5

1. Niemann, Christoph
Blogs. 2. IllustratorsUnited
StatesBlogs. I.

Title.

NC975.5.N54A35 2012

741.6092dc23

2011032766

Text copyright 2012 Christoph Niemann

All illustrations/photographs copyright 2012 Christoph Niemann.

Published in 2012 by Abrams, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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My sons Arthur, five, and Gustav, three, are obsessed with the New York City subway system.

They can barely sit through an episode of Sesame Street. But when we go for aimless subway joyrides on the weekends, they sit like little angels, devoutly calling out the names of every station for hours.

People often ask me for directions in the subway. Even though I know my way around rather well, I still have to defer to Arthur very often. Yet it seems people dont trust the advice of a preschooler. They should.

Arthur knows the map so well that when he got his first pair of subway-map socks, he pointed out with a chuckle that it had the Q still running as an orange line.

Arthur spends hours studying the subway map. He laughs at his mother when she suggests taking the B on a weekend. The only questions he has are about the pronunciation of some station names.

This morning he read the timetable for the number 3 train and sang the stations to the tune of Shalom Aleichem.

The two happiest words Arthur and Gustav can hope to hear are service changes.

They see everything through a subway lens. When they fight about who gets which cup for their apple juice, they dont refer to them by color.

When we had our third son recently, my wife, Lisa, and I knew that we could not name him anything like Ivan, Keith, Otto, Pierre, Toby, Ulysses, or Xavier. We decided to go with Fritz.

A chaperone on one of Arthurs school trips told me something he overheard when all the kids were neatly lined up in rows of two. The girl holding Arthurs hand asked him, Have you heard of Peter Pan? No, he replied. Have you heard of Metro-North?

When your child cries in public, it is usually an uncomfortable situation. Once, we needed to get home quickly from Chambers Street, and I told Gustav that we had to take whichever blue train came next. The A train pulled in, and Gustav (who had been hoping for the C) started throwing a fit. However, the other passengers in the car gave me warm smiles. I guess they hadnt seen that many three-year-olds sobbing, Local I want the local.

We often go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. They have a little childrens garden that the boys love. Arthur and Gustavs favorite spot is a little gap between some bushes, from which you can see the Franklin Avenue shuttle train go by.

There is one place thats even better than the subway: the Transit Museum! One weekend, I promised them they could stay there as long as they wanted, just to find out how long they could possibly last. After four hours, I heard the announcement that the museum would close in ten minutes. Arthur and Gustav cried as I dragged them out.